The Timing Is Perfect
So much of an audience’s ability to truly see a film from the director's point of view comes from timing. Timing is everything, especially for films that mark a continuation of a director's collaborative relationship with certain actors. In the case of Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, the timing is PERFECT. I cannot imagine audiences (Or critics) being as open-minded as they were towards Kinds Of Kindness had The Favourite and Poor Things not come out first. Every time Lanthimos creates something new, audiences get a little more used to his mad genius. American audiences who watch him know his tone and style by now. They may not understand it completely but they’ve wrapped their heads around his beautiful European arthouse insanity and what that brings to his films.
Kindness Of Kindness has 3 different stories with every cast member playing a different character in each one. The first one follows Jesse Plemmons Robert, a masochist whose entire life is dictated by his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe) who gives Robert strange instructions every day, even going as far as to control his diet and when he can have sex with his wife Sarah (Hong Chau), a woman Raymond specifically instructed Robert to court.
Things finally come to a screeching halt when Raymond asks Robert to run over a man with his car. Robert’s refusal causes Raymond to disown him, Sarah leaves in horror upon discovery of the dynamics that shaped her marriage and Robert soon begins following Raymond’s new submissive Rita (Emma Stone). Despite desperate and needy pleas to Raymond and his icy wife Vivian (Margaret Qualley) Robert remains cast aside and he spends more time with Rita who while submissive to Raymond’s demands is nowhere near as nervous as Robert and has a childish earnestness to her. Rita is NOT Bella Baxter. She is not confident but she’s not insecure either. She treats Raymond’s dominance over her as another customer service job. She’s a pro at what she does, to say the least.
Rita eventually messes up when she crashes her car trying to run over the man Robert refused to kill. The man lives but both he and Rita end up in the hospital badly injured. Robert takes this opportunity to gain back Raymond’s favoritism leading to an irreversibly immoral act of desperation.
The second story follows Daniel (Jesse Plemons), a police officer whose missing marine biologist wife Liz (Emma Stone) returns after being lost at sea. Initially overjoyed, Daniel soon suspects that the returned woman is not Liz. She has a craving for chocolate which she’s never liked before, their cat becomes aggressive towards her, and her shoes are too small for her. “I’ll make them fit!” she insists as Daniel watches her uncomfortably squeeze her feet into the suffocating footwear.
The noise the shoes make as she attempts to make them fit is stomach-turning and nauseating but there is so much more nauseating behavior to come. Daniel’s paranoia eventually causes him to deteriorate and he is let go from his job after his lack of focus causes him to shoot a man in the hand. Despite pleas from his friends Neil & Martha (Mamoudou Athie & Margaret Qualley) Daniel continues to suspect Liz is someone else and begins ordering her around. Liz is completely obedient even as the requests grow more consequential and border towards self-harm leaving Liz’s broken-hearted father (Willem Dafoe) unable to make her see reason. She nonchalantly tells him of a dream she had in which dogs were the dominant species and humans were kept as pets. A visit to the gynecologist soon leads to a showdown in which there will be no winners.
The third and final story (My personal favorite) sees Emma Stone as Emily, a devout member of a sex cult led by Omi & Aki (Willem Dafoe & Hong Chau). She and the other members live at Omi & Aki’s luxury mansion and only drink purified water that Aki cries a tear into during a daily ritual. The cult also has to cleanse out their toxins in a high-temperature sauna which reveals if they’ve had sex with anyone other than Omi & Aki. Emily has been looking for some time upon request by her dominants to find a woman they believe can bring back the dead. She meets Rebecca (Margaret Qualley) in a diner who thinks her twin sister Ruth is the one the cult is looking for. Emily stalks Ruth at her veteran clinic and gains her trust by bringing in an injured animal. Emily is eventually banished from the cult after her angry ex-husband (Joe Alwyn) date rapes her and she raises to desperate lengths to get back in the cult’s good graces by drugging Ruth and bringing her to a morgue with the intent to force her into resurrecting a body.
Yorgos Lanthimo’s films have always been along the lines of being something smack down in the middle of comedy and drama. Most of his films have ventured towards drama. The Favourite and Poor Things marked a comedic turning point in his work. Those films were also very much about people finding themselves. Kinds Of Kindness is a return to the unanswerable psychology of lost people that he’s been so well known for. Some people can’t be found, least of all by themselves. Absurdism applies to all of Lanthimos films and I think this election is very interesting (PERFECT) timing for people to see Kinds of Kindness. Why do people listen to extremists no matter how absurd they are? No matter what they do or say, they’ll still have allies in their corner. Why? What do they provide to the people who support them? Are they being controlled by a man they’ve never met? Or are they submitting to him because they’re addicted to his dominance?
Kinds Of Kindness can be a very unsettling and upsetting drama but again, it’s an absurdist work about absurdist individuals that I think on some level, we can all relate to. It’s a fascinating conversation starter (If you’re lucky enough to have open-minded indie lovers in your corner) and now that Kinds Of Kindness is available on various streaming services, I’m sure audiences will engage in thoughtful conversation that only the mad hatter of cinema himself can bring forth.
Kinds Of Kindness (2024). (2024, September 16). SCREENRANT. https://screenrant.com/db/movie/kinds-of-kindness-2024/
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